I walked past the Moscone Center in SF yesterday morning and found out the reason why every hotel in SF was fully booked this week… it’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. I’ve attended JavaOne a few times, an XML conference and a couple of others in the past, but what surprised me yesterday morning was the number of conference attendees in suits. This sounds like a strange thing to mention, but this is SF, this California – I haven’t had to wear a suit for years, and yet here are all these people making their pilgrimage to the Moscone Center and a large proportion of them are wearing suits. Do DBAs typically wear suits? Not the ones I’ve worked with in the past. I can only imagine that Oracle conferences attract a high proportion of business types for networking possibilities?
Anyway, Oracle’s big news so far this week: they are introducing their own virtualization software based on the Xen open source project, to allow running multiple virtual servers on the same hardware. XenSource incidentally was recently acquired by Citrix, another long time major player in the virtualization space.